A month after the deadline for responses to the Home Office, not
one of the 43 police forces in England Wales has given approval to the
Government's plans for the most radical restructuring of our policing since
1829. Charles Clarke and Hazel Blears wish to merge the 43 forces into 12
regional "super forces" as part of John Prescott's grand design to divide up the
United Kingdom into "Euro-regions", each under its own government.

No chief constable has been more forthright in opposition to this
plan than Paul West, whose West Mercia force, serving Shropshire, Herefordshire
and Worcestershire, is officially rated as the best-performing force in the
country. Last week Mr West was taken by a local MP, Owen Paterson, to put his
case to Ms Blears at the Home Office. Dismissing his force's exceptional record,
it soon became apparent that she attached no significance to his views. It was
painfully clear that "consultation" is only a charade. The Government is bent on
forcing through its regional agenda regardless.

Following the overwhelming rejection of an elected regional
assembly by the voters of the North-East, it seems the Government is hoping to
reach its goal the other way round. So many powers are now being passed upwards
from local authorities to unelected regional bodies - from police and planning
to fire and ambulance services - that eventually, it is hoped, people will
demand that these are made democratically accountable through elected regional
governments.

The greatest revolution in local government for 1,000 years will
be complete - without the Government ever having had to admit openly what it was
up to.

The argument for social control goes like this: if
you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from a national data bank of
identity/the terrorism act/the tapping of MPs' phones/the use of the
public-order act to control protest and limit free expression/the new powers of
arrest/the retention of DNA samples taken from innocent juveniles.

Over the past few months, I have listened to five people airily make this
pitch. Not one of them was a complete fool; it's just that they haven't been
paying attention to the Prime Minister's unflagging mission to increase the
power of the state over the individual, to the shoal of anti-libertarian laws
which have slipped through a mesmerised parliament.

If they have
noticed anything, they tend, without much thought, to interpret it as a
government doing its best to make us safer from terrorists and criminals. They
conclude that if you are neither a terrorist nor a criminal, you have nothing to
worry about. Wrong.

They have only to consider the 24,000 juveniles who have not been cautioned,
charged or convicted with any crime, yet whose DNA has been retained by the
police, to wonder if some extra-parliamentary commission should be set up to
examine the state of liberty in Britain and the motives of this odious regime of
sinister mediocrities.

On the evidence, an outsider might guess that Britain has suffered a
calamitous national crisis, a convulsion of historic significance. But it has
not, and neither has the rest of the Western alliance. In the four years since
al-Qaeda launched its war in earnest, fewer than 5,000 people have lost their
lives in attacks in, among other places, Washington DC and New York, Bali,
Madrid, London and Sharm el Sheik. Large numbers were wounded - 1,460 in Madrid;
700 in London - but compare this to the Blitz, in which more than were lost and
many more were wounded.

Osama bin Laden only managed a small war and, whatever the intention behind
the tape released last week, it must now be sensible to look at the past four
years for what they are. Shocking, yes. Baffling and sickening, yes. But a
catastrophe in the widest sense, no. Western society has not been derailed.
Economies continue to grow and there is much evidence of optimism and energetic
evaluation of the world's real problems.

This is not complacency, but a realistic assessment of how things are. We
should not belittle the people sacrificed to this lunatic's need for attention,
but, equally, we should guard against the habits of fear and the opportunism of
sinister forces in Number 10, the Home office and the endlessly indulged police
force.

Last week, I visited a publishing house in central London. A security guard
asked me to enter my name into a keyboard before I received a pass. I noticed a
tiny camera on a stalk peering over the keyboard to take a snap of the visitor's
face as he keys in his name. I refused and made my way to the lift without a
pass, to the consternation of the security staff. Why this obsessive need to
photograph, to record names and times of entry? Any serious terrorist would get
round this pathetic device. Besides, the building probably rates no higher as a
target than my cat. It's a pointless exercise, yet it emphasises the state we
have got ourselves into over the actual threat of terrorism.

We do not yet live in a police state, but we are certainly building a society
where free speech, the right to protest and conduct our lives without scrutiny
by a central authority could be seriously threatened. There is no government in
the Western alliance, not even America, which has taken such a bewildering lurch
to the authoritarian right since 11 September and met with such little
opposition, either in the media or in parliament.

It has been a stealth attack, similar to the approach the Chancellor has used
to raise taxes without appearing to do so. While seeming to be friendly to the
idea of personal liberty on such things as opening hours and gambling, the
government has steadily pursued its campaign of social control.

If you put to one side Blair's addiction to summary justice and focus on the
measures carried out in the name of security, you find two streams: those
devoted to reduction of free speech and the right to protest, and those that
concentrate on the surveillance and monitoring of innocent citizens.

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (Socpa) falls in the first
category. Apart from increasing the police's powers of arrest, it removed the
right to demonstrate within one kilometre of parliament, a right people still
possess in Serbia and Ukraine. Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, meanwhile,
allows police to stop and search anyone in a designated area. This has been used
to obstruct demonstrations against the Iraq war, global capitalism and arms
fairs and even those who heckled speakers at last year's Labour party
conference. Linked with issuing Asbos, it has proved highly effective in
controlling demonstrations which offend the government.

To limit what can be said in public, the government also inserted a provision
in Socpa that criminalises opinions that are held to stir up religious hatred.
You may not make a joke about Islam, Judaism or Christianity without risking a
criminal record. And section 5 of the Public Order Act allows police to
prosecute if they believe a hate crime has been committed. Last week, they were
investigating a leading Muslim, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who made remarks on Radio 4s
PM programme about homosexuality being morally and medically unacceptable.
Sacranie's views are daft and tasteless, but why shouldn't he express them? Why
should there be any legal restraint on the doubts I may voice about parts of his
faith, its views on homosexuality, for example? That is the nature of free
speech and we do not need a bunch of PC Plods patrolling our exchange.

If anything, the strand of Blair's campaign devoted to surveillance and
bugging is much more worrying. He has already granted MI5 and the police powers
to pry on people's email and text messages. According to the Independent on
Sunday, he now plans to allow MPs' communications to be intercepted by MI5. It
is astonishing that parliament did not erupt. If US senators and members of
Congress were being bugged, there would be an outcry. The constitution would be
flourished, as it is now by Greenpeace, the Council for American-Islamic
Relations and a number of well-known writers such as Christopher Hitchens and
James Bamford in a case claiming the Bush administration's use of wiretaps is a
violation of privacy and free speech.

We need a constitution to guarantee similar rights, but failing that, I'd
like to see a bit more of that truculence when it comes to Blair's pet proposal
of a national database of identity that will include no less than 50 separate
pieces of information on each of us, at cost of £350-£500 per head. What
business has he got charging us for invading our privacy with his ID cards
scheme when so many on his own side agree it will count for nothing in the fight
against terrorism and fraud?

Does anyone care about the proposals to extend the automatic numberplate
recognition system throughout Britain's motorway network so that the details of
every journey by every innocent member of the public are retained? I spent an
entire day last week being batted from the Home Office to the Department of
Transport and the Highways Agency trying to determine what legislation enables
this scheme. The answer is none. I spoke to the pleasant chief constable of
Hertfordshire, Frank Whiteley, who advocates this system on behalf of the
Association of Chief Police Officers. He made points about the detection of
criminals and terrorists, but conceded there was indeed a cost to civil
liberties.

Piece by piece, that system is being built because the CCTV cameras already
in place can also read numberplates. Yet there has been no debate in parliament,
no special powers enacted, no one questioning the cost or the privacy issues.
Make no mistake - we are wiring up for the police
state.

Byte by byte, our
identity is being stolen

Minette
Marrin

Years ago sophisticated travellers in
far-flung places used to smile indulgently at simple tribal people afraid
of having their photograph taken. It seemed that in their ignorant way the
tribal folk feared that their identity itself was being given for ever
into the power of the photographer and his strange machine, to make
whatever spells he liked. As it turns out, they were right and are having
the last indulgent smile, if not exactly the last laugh, on us.

Our identity — or rather countless aspects of it — is being taken from
us in countless new ways by information snapshots. It is complex and
frightening. What is deceptive is that each individual loss seems quite
trivial; it seems a small matter to hand over elaborate details to a bank,
an insurance company, a mortgage company, a credit card company. But every
time we make a trivial transaction, we make many of these details
available to countless others, both legally and before long illegally.

It
makes me feel faintly anxious when an unknown voice in a cinema booking
office, on hearing my postcode, gives my exact address. What else does she
know? What else could she know if she made the effort? Or if she were
dishonest? It is alarming. The ether, or the virtual ether, is heaving
with private details about all of us, like the accumulating rubbish in
space. All that is as nothing, however, compared with the efforts of the
state to steal our identities. What’s worse is that the rate of theft —
for it really is a kind of theft — seems to be increasing fast.

On Friday it emerged that 24,000 young people aged between 10 and 18
have their DNA profiles stored on a nationwide database, even though they
have never been cautioned, charged or convicted of an offence. Their
genetic identities have been stored by the state for absolutely no reason.

This came out because a diligent MP took the trouble to find out for a
constituent why a boy who was wrongly arrested in a case — please note —
of mistaken identity, had his DNA profile taken and stored by the police.
It seems that of the 3m DNA profiles now held by the national database,
nearly 140,000 are from people who have never been charged or cautioned.
Why? Worse still, this is perfectly legal. Why? Yesterday it was reported
that records of all criminal convictions, and of all cautions, will remain
on police files for 100 years, from April onwards. Chief constables have
suddenly overturned the principle that offences can be “spent”. This puts
paid to the chance of living down youthful indiscretions and turning over
a new leaf.

Our medical records are to be made widely available on the new National
Health Service computer system, under the Care Record Development Board,
for all kinds of NHS employees to obtain, not to mention snoops and
hackers. Last week the British Medical Association’s family doctors’
committee, to its great credit, decided that patients should be asked to
consent, formally, to having their records entered on the new database.

Earlier the government was offering NHS patients the choice of opting
out of this, but the GPs voted to require explicit consent, meaning
explicit agreement to opt in. It seems extraordinary that there was ever
any assumption that this extremely important matter need not necessarily
be taken to parliament, and that we might just as well give way passively
to the erratic powers of IT. But such is the temper of the times.

Our masters (and mistresses) seem determined to know more and more
about us, right across the oceans and the ether. In this country we are
still being threatened with ID cards, which might hold all sorts of
information on those dark and shiny strips.

In the US the Department of Justice is even now trying to force Google,
the internet search engine, to hand over records of what people have been
looking for when they visit the site. Specifically they asked for a list
of terms entered during a single week, and 1m randomly selected web
addresses. Google is valiantly resisting this extreme invasion of privacy
but Microsoft and Yahoo! have already complied. Good for Google one must
say; but it is unlikely that even Google will be able to resist the
Goliath of the US Justice Department.

Those who have nothing to hide, people always say, have nothing to fear
from releasing all these personal details (voluntarily or otherwise). That
is a terrible mistake. It is to misunderstand the importance of privacy in
human affairs and it’s to ignore the constant threat of hackers.

It is also to underestimate the importance of error in human affairs,
most particularly in computer use. One of the worst things about all these
databases is the mistakes they make and then disseminate far and wide.
Credit checking agencies, for instance, regularly make bad mistakes, as
people with good credit who get wrongly listed as bad debtors will tell
you. It is very hard to discover such mistakes or to reverse them.

IT is one of the most powerful tools and at the same time one of the
most serious problems for public services today. The police and the Crown
Prosecution Service, for instance, have had serious problems with IT
interface and as for the NHS computer system, one can only call it an
expensive disaster. The much vaunted electronic booking system is a year
behind schedule and the entire £6.2 billion NHS computer system is in
danger of collapsing, according to a recent leak from a civil servant.
Would you seriously trust such a system with details about a mental
illness or an abortion? It now emerges that there is a great deal of
identity fraud surrounding the tax credit system; one would have to be
daft to file tax returns online.

Perhaps I seem unduly cynical about police information systems, but
there is always human error. In the trial of the Notting Hill rapist, for
instance, it emerged that the rapist had originally been ignored as a
suspect because a Home Office computer inaccurately reported that on the
date of one of the offences he was still in jail. More recently we have
the disgraceful confusion over lists of sex offenders.

I hardly know which is worse — a state that is good at getting and
guarding our personal records, or one which is pretty bad. But either way,
the time has come to think carefully and publicly about how we want to use
technology to stop the recording eye of Big Brother stealing our
identities.